Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Canada pulls a Heidi on the CFL, eh

We all know that hockey is the national sport of Canada, but those Canuks are pretty big football fans as well, especially for their beloved CFL.

On Saturday the Canadian Broadcasting Company chose not to resume coverage of the Edmonton Eskimos-Saskatchewan Roughriders game after a power outage at Mosaic Stadium in Regina caused a delay.

Instead of returning to the final 13 minutes of the game, the CBC stayed with a movie that had been running as filler for about 55 minutes. The movie, starring Nick Nolte, was The Good Thief.

The game, which resumed at about 1:30 a.m. EST, was available online at CBCSports.ca and carried on television in Saskatchewan, but nowhere else.

A mid-level female executive - who has hopefully already been taken out back and shot - made the decision not to air the remaining minutes of the game despite protests from the CBC staff. Unfortunately, no one could get in touch with Scott Moore, the head of CBC Sports, because he had his cell phone turned off. Moore has since apologized to the CFL commissioner and said something like ths won't happen again.

Like the famous Heidi game, the lead on Saturday night changed hands after the national broadcast was discontinued. Edmonton was ahead 32-27 in the fourth quarter when the outage caused by a lightning storm stopped the game. After the resumption 55 minutes later, the Roughriders scored 12 points to win 39-32.

At least this happened in the CFL. I can't even imagine what would happen if something like this happened today in the NFL. Total armageddon.

-WCK

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